This religious indifference of the clergy and of the people explains the success, not only of the heresiarchs who presented themselves as reformers of manners and discipline, but even of the sects held in the lowest esteem, the sorcerers, for instance. The facts are too numerous and too well-authenticated to admit of any doubt upon this head. There existed throughout all Europe, in the Middle Ages, numerous sects of sorcerers and witches who in all seriousness professed to give themselves over to the devil in exchange for the gift of magic power. The Spanish Inquisition was not the only body which sent them to the stake, after having submitted them to trial and received the confession of their misdeeds; the French tribunals pronounced sentence of death in similar cases when the accused, after long and minute interrogatories, but without being put to the torture, made a confession of their satanic orgies known by the name of _sabbat_ (Fig. 314). This kind of heresy eluded all the steps taken by the civil and the religious powers to put it down. The “Histoire des Procès de Sorcellerie,” by Soldam, tells us that, even at the close of the sixteenth century, from 1590 to 1594, thirty-five witches were condemned to be burnt, out of a total population of six thousand, in the small Protestant town of Nordling, in Germany. The enormities of the sect of sorcerers attest, no doubt, a profound depravation of morals, but they contained no germ of social revolution; such, however, was not the case with the theories expounded by the great heresiarchs. [Illustration: Fig. 314.--The “Sabbat,” reprint of the legend contained in a sentence of the Arras Tribunal in 1460.--Engraving of the Sixteenth Century, preserved in the National Library, Paris.]